In 1998, a story that had persisted in African-American oral history for some
200 years, but was dismissed by mainstream historians as rumor, gossip, or
worse, was finally proved largely true with the help of DNA science. DNA
tests, considered along with a fresh reading of the historical evidence, have
led most historians and other experts on the matter to the conclusion that
it's highly probable Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one, if not all, of the
children of his slave Sally Hemings. The story struck like a thunderbolt from the
past, forcing new public consideration of Jefferson, and America's mixed race
past.

In "Jefferson's Blood," FRONTLINE correspondent Shelby Steele and
producer Tom Lennon re-examine Jefferson's life, and piece together the
little that can be known about Sally Hemings. Steele and Lennon also explore
the repercussions of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship for the couple's
modern-day descendants, many of whom are still attempting to find their place
along America's blurred color line. "[Jefferson] spawned two lines of
descendants--one legitimate, one not," Steele says in the documentary. "And
this bastardized part of his family would be driven by a sense of
incompleteness."

Moving back and forth between Jefferson's eighteenth-century world and the
present day, FRONTLINE's "Jefferson's Blood" draws a complicated and compelling
portrait of the contradictions in Thomas Jefferson's character, weighing the
decisions he made in his private life with his public pronouncements on slavery
and race-mixing. The documentary shows a Thomas Jefferson who we rarely
confront--sharing Monticello with his white daughter and grandchildren while
his unacknowledged mistress and his children by her worked in the same house as
slaves.

Two of Sally Hemings's children and their families settled in Ohio--after being
freed by an obscure codicil to Jefferson's will. Some lived as blacks and some
chose to pass as white.
"Jefferson's Blood" reveals how the racial ambiguity that colored their birth
haunted succeeding generations of this family. FRONTLINE viewers meet the
Cooper sisters, Jefferson-Hemings descendants. Raised as white, the sisters
only recently learned of their mixed racial origin and connection to the late
president. This discovery, however, left the Cooper Family deeply divided,
with some members eager to learn more about their black heritage and others
content to leave the past buried.

"This is a story of racial identity and its cruel exclusions, played out in one
family over 200 years." says producer Lennon. "Does race make family
impossible for Jefferson's descendants? Or can they comprise a family despite
race?" In tracing 200 years of a family's secrets, denials, and painful
legacies, FRONTLINE's "Jefferson's Blood" is a haunting reminder of the
continuing, mysterious power of race in America.